I don’t claim to have studied Medicare in depth. They send me the Reports in the same envelope with the Social Security Reports and I browse through them, but that is pretty much it. So this post is more of a call for people more informed on aspects of Medicare to chip in. But I […]
I suspect few people know that the original Social Security Act set up not one but two retirement systems. Title 2 set up what we recognize as Social Security today, a worker funded retirement based on an insurance model. Title 1 set up something quite different. The history can be found on the SSA.gov website […]
Lets take a trip in Mr. Wizard’s Way Back Machine all the way to the year 2000. At that point we see Social Security geek Webb jumping in excitement (being one of the few people in history to get excited over Social Security financials). What is the source of this rather odd behavior? Well it […]
Well more than you might think. If you examine the economic and demographic assumptions that together generate the standard Intermediate Cost alternative of the Social Security Trustees you see a picture of a future America that is kind of bleak. I mean I lived through the period from 1968 to 1983 and economically it was […]
Even before the latest flooding, a group representing engineers said the United States needed to spend about $1 trillion more than it does now to bring infrastructure up to par with modern needs and standards. Wow. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. But as it happens we have in fact an identified revenue […]
For those of you not in the mood for numeric wonkery Biggs also points us to Furman’s response to Larry Lindsey’s Obama Turns FDR Upside Down. In an letter included in Obama’s Proposals for Social Security Considered Furman gives us this: There is much to disagree with in Larry Lindsey’s June 20 op-ed, “Obama Turns […]
More homework for Coberly and Arne (and any others who want to join in). Andrew Biggs alerts us to the release of the Treasury Department’s Issue Brief No. 5: Social Security Reform: Strategies for Progressive Benefit Adjustments The proposal seems quite interesting. Rather than simply readjusting the benefit schedule by some blunt change in method […]
Andrew Biggs was Deputy Commissioner of Social Security until February, previously he was a top analyst at Cato’s Project for Social Security Privatization, currently he is doing something quite similar at AEI. He has a blog called Notes on Social Security Reform which deserves more traffic, not just because Andrew is a nice guy and […]
Although a lot of people are aware that ‘Low Cost is Out There’ it is difficult to impossible to find anyone who takes it seriously. Some experts simply dismiss it out of hand (Samwick), others point to the Stochastic Projections and simply deem it unlikely (Biggs), then again others reject it on grounds that run […]
Just a brief shot before going out the door. In both the Obama and McCain camps there are separate but related discussion of ‘privatization’ and charges that in particular McCain is lying, or that the people who claim that Bush never supported ‘privatization’ are lunatics. But I fear that a rhetorical trap is being laid […]